Frontline Syria by David L. Phillips

Author:David L. Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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Armenians and Christians

Our weapon is the prayer, the spreading of spirit of love, brotherhood and tolerance.1

—Omar, Administrator of the Protestant Church in Kobani

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The historic homeland of Armenians encompasses territory in what is today the Republic of Armenia, as well as lands incorporated into the Republic of Turkey that Armenian nationalists refer to as Western Armenia. Beginning in 1915, the Ottoman Empire deported ethnic Armenians from Anatolia. As many as 1.5 million Armenians died between 1915 and 1923 in what is known as the Armenian Genocide. A mass grave of Armenian victims is located outside of Deir ez-Zor in eastern Syria. Human bones protrude from the ground with remains scattered across a barren desert.2 Up to 100,000 survivors of the Armenian Genocide resettled in Syria, seeking sanctuary for their Church and civilization.

Faith is fundamental to Armenians, with victimization at the core of their collective identity. The principles of self-sacrifice and martyrdom are foundational not only to Armenians but also to all Christians. Christianity teaches that those who are willing to suffer and die for their faith are saved through their devotion to Jesus Christ. It is written in Galatians, “Jesus gave his life for our sins, just as God our Father planned, in order to rescue us from this evil world in which we live.”3 Devotees believe in the power of prayer and bestowing loving kindness even toward an aggressor.

Jesus spent some of His ministry in Syria and made Peter the first Pope while in Syria.4 When the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) stormed across the Iraqi border in June 2014, it targeted apostates—Shiites, Kurds, Yezidis, and Christians. Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, was overrun by ISIS. Its sixty thousand Christians were executed, displaced, or trafficked as sex slaves. The same fate befell Christians in the Nineveh Plains and North and East Syria (NES). ISIS seized ancient churches, some nearly 2,000 years old, and converted them into mosques, madrassas, and prisons. They tore down crosses from the churches and used chisels to deface tombstones in church graveyards. Syria’s Christian population was 250,000 in 2011. Only thirty thousand remained in Syria by the end of 2016.5

ISIS envisioned a worldwide jihad against Christians. The ISIS magazine, Dabiq, displayed images of crucified Christians as “a message in blood written to the Nation of the Cross.”6 Dabiq featured a picture of St. Peter’s Square with an ISIS flag superimposed atop its holy obelisk. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ISIS founder and self-declared caliph, said his fighters would march “all the way to Rome,” and along the way, “break the crosses [and] trade and sell their women.”7 When ISIS occupied a Christian community, it offered residents a stark choice: forced conversion, slavery, extortion, or execution.

Some Muslims opposed Baghdadi’s harsh terror tactics and deemed these tactics as un-Islamic. They pointed out that the Prophet Muhammad taught mercy and humanitarian action. The term “Jihad’ was not meant to legitimize the carnage of nonbelievers. Rather, it described an act of self-improvement for devotees on a spiritual path. King Abdullah

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